Vengeance
by vandevere
Summary: A Home Invasion from years ago wreaks havoc upon both the innocent and the guilty...Chapter 5 up. Story complete
1. Chapter 1

Vengeance

 _Manhattan General Hospital_

It was a miracle that Laura Taylor was alive at all. Police officers had found her, bound and gagged in Central Park. She had been badly beaten but was very much alive.

"Was she raped?" Detective Lennie Briscoe asked the Chief Resident on call.

"No," Dr. Kennedy said. "In fact, there's no evidence of any sexual activity; consensual or otherwise."

"Can we talk to her?"

"Yeah…" Kennedy nodded. "She's awake and aware."

…..

Laura Taylor was in a private room, not a curtained-off space.

 _She has money,_ Detective Rey Curtis thought to himself as he and Lennie Briscoe walked in.

The victim was over forty, blonde, with carefully styled hair. Even with her face turning all the colors of the rainbow, she looked alert.

 _Frightened too._

A cane, one of the modern metal ones, lay by the side of the hospital bed.

"Dr. Kennedy didn't say anything about a leg injury."

"There wasn't a leg injury," Taylor responded. "This is what the doctors call a pre-existing condition. And you are?"

"Oh! Sorry…" Curtis recollected himself, started over. "I'm Detective Rey Curtis, and my partner is Detective Lennie Briscoe. We're here to take your statement about what happened to you. Do you know why this happened?"

"Yes," Taylor nodded. "They _told_ me. Before you ask, they work face masks, bulky disguises, and spoke through voice synthesizers. I can't tell you if they were white or black, or anything else for that matter. I couldn't even tell you if they were men, or women. All I know is what they told me."

"What did they say?" Curtis asked.

"They told me I murdered someone."

…..

 _27_ _th_ _Precinct_

"This gang kidnaps Laura Taylor, tells her they're going to execute her for the murder of Elaine Farrow in Nineteen Eighty-seven, in Newark, New Jersey?"

Lieutenant Anita Van Buren listed off the facts of the case, then continued.

"Was Ms. Taylor residing in Newark at the time?"

"No," Lennie Briscoe looked up from his notes of the interview with Laura Taylor. "She _had_ been living in Newark up to Nineteen Eighty- _five_. But she left when her marriage to Johnny Nash broke up. After the Divorce, she went to live with her parents in Manhattan."

" _Was_ there a murder?" Van Buren asked.

"Rey's checking with Newark right now." Briscoe looked up. "And, speak of the devil, and here he is, and it looks like he hit the motherlode."

Curtis was walking up to his desk, a thick file's worth of faxed reports in hand.

"It was a home invasion," he began without preamble. "Miss Elaine Farrow was brutally murdered in her Newark apartment on April 19th, Nineteen Eighty-Seven. No suspects were ever identified."

"Is it possible Ms. Taylor was involved?" Van Buren asked.

"We cleared her, LT." Curtis replied. "First, she had left Newark two years before."

"She might have returned for a visit, Rey." Van Buren pointed out.

"Not that year," Lennie spoke up. "She had been hit by a hit and run driver, almost lost her right leg. As it turns out, this happened April 17th of that year. Just two days before the home invasion that killed Elaine Farrow. She was in no condition to go _anywhere_."

"We have proof of this, Lennie?"

"Yeah…" Briscoe looked down at his notes again. "It happened before Dr. Kennedy's time, but he was able to access hospital records. Laura Taylor, admitted to Manhattan General, on 4/17/87. She didn't leave the hospital until 6/12/87, where she was admitted to a private facility for physical therapy. She literally _couldn't_ have been involved in the home invasion. She said she told them about that. Apparently, they checked her information out, then let her go."

"How would the kidnappers be able to verify that?" Van Buren asked.

"Same way _we_ would," Curtis replied. "They probably called Manhattan General, and verified her story that way."

"Which means they pretended to be cops, so they could get the hospital staff to cooperate," Briscoe paused now, said the thing Curtis was really hoping he wouldn't say.

"Think we're looking at vigilantes here."

"Lovely…" Van Buren snorted. "And it seems they almost took an innocent person."

"We'll talk to her again tomorrow," Briscoe promised. "She was pretty shaken today. Maybe she'll have a better grasp of what went down."

"Hope so…" Curtis sighed. "We do _not_ need vigilantes running around and taking the Law into their own hands."

"Also, check with the hospital staff at Manhattan General," Van Buren advised. "I know this happened years ago, but there might be a few hospital employees who were there when this happened. I want those kidnappers found. They could have killed an innocent woman."

Now, it was Lennie Briscoe's turn to heave a sigh.

 _Vigilantism is a blight on society…_


	2. Chapter 2

_East River_

Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis looked down at the badly decomposed body. The CSU on the site said the victim had been dead for about four days.

Whatever passed for wildlife had done a number on the body. The eyes were gone, fingers and toes too.

 _The East River. I'd rather eat a gun…_

Detective Lennie Briscoe remembered Mike Logan had said that once.

Years ago.

A wallet had been found in the victim's pants pocket.

Briscoe felt a sinking sensation as he looked down at the ID.

 _John W. Nash_

Briscoe sighed as he handed the wallet and ID to Rey Curtis.

"He lived in Newark, New Jersey. Looks like they, whoever _they_ are, got him too," Curtis commented.

"Yeah…Same bastards who almost killed Ms. Taylor did kill her ex-hubby. Let's see if Liz Rodgers can pencil us in for an interview…"

…..

 _Manhattan general Hospital_

"Detective Curtis!" Laura Taylor was sitting up in her bed, metal cane leaning against the small side table. "The doctors said you wanted to talk to me again."

"We need to talk about your ex-husband, Johnny Nash," Rey Curtis said. "He was found in the East River this morning."

"Wh…what?" All the color faded from her face. " _How?"_

Now came the hard part, telling how Nash had died. Curtis sighed, bowed his head, and let the words come out.

"He was beaten to death, roughly a day before your kidnap and assault."

"Jesus… Why, Detective Curtis?"

"We don't know, Ms. Taylor. What kind of a guy was he? You divorced him, after all. Was he abusive?"

"No…" she wiped the tears away. "He was a philanderer; he slept around, and I caught him red-handed. But he never hit me, never assaulted anyone. Seriously, he wouldn't hurt a fly."

Taylor looked up fearfully.

"Was this because of Elaine Farrow's death?"

"We think it might be related," Curtis nodded. "Is there anything you want to add?"

"Maybe…Don't know if it means anything, but one of Johnny's affairs was with a woman named Elaine. I never learned her last name. Was she married? Did she have a family?"

"We'll find out," Curtis assured her. "Whatever happens, I think you're out of it now."

"They're not going to come after me again?"

"They had the resources to check your claim of being in the hospital when Elaine Farrow was killed," Curtis explained. "Sorry to say it this way, but if they hadn't been able to verify your claim, they probably would have killed you."

"Just like they killed Johnny…" Laura Taylor sighed. "You know…Just because I divorced Johnny never meant I stopped loving him. I did love him. I just couldn't trust him."

Rey Curtis bowed his head. He had almost lost his marriage to Deborah for the exact same reason.

"We'll find out who killed him," he promised.

…..

 _1 Hogan Place_

"That's quite the tangled web you've got there," Jack McCoy sat at his desk, Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Curtis sitting directly across.

"Yeah…" Briscoe could only agree. "One murder in Newark, in Nineteen Eighty-seven, another murder, and an attempted murder, here in Manhattan; and both of those seemingly directly correlated to the murder in Nineteen Eighty-seven."

"So…" McCoy leaned forward. "What do we know of Elaine Farrow?"

"Elaine Farrow," Rey Curtis began reading off biographical details from his notepad. "Born in Nineteen Fifty-three, married Police Sergeant Raymond J. Farrow in Nineteen Seventy-four. Three children, two boys, and one girl. Elaine Farrow was found bludgeoned to death in the bedroom. The investigators declared it a home invasion."

"Did they investigate Raymond Farrow?" McCoy demanded.

"He and his partner were on call at the time."

"I see…" McCoy looked down at his own notes. "How the hell did anyone manage to draw the line from Elaine Farrow to Johnny Nash?"

"At the time, Nash was self-employed as a general Home and Lawn contractor. He may have been hired by the Farrows for lawn maintenance. Also, Ms. Taylor said he had an affair with someone called Elaine. She's not sure if it was Mrs. Farrow, though…"

"I'll send word to Newark," McCoy said. "Looks like the Farrow Case needs to be reopened if we're going to make any sense of the assault on Laura Taylor, and Mr. Nash's murder."


	3. Chapter 3

Vengeance 3

 _Newark, NJ_

 _3_ _rd_ _Precinct_

 _649 Market Street_

"Yeah…" Lieutenant Raymond Farrow sat at his desk, across from the visiting Manhattan detective. "Elaine and I were separated at the time, which is why she was living in that godawful apartment when she was killed."

"You were having problems in your marriage?" Detective Lennie Briscoe sipped his coffee.

Farrow sighed.

"We'd been married for almost fourteen years, Detective," he said. "We had three kids, two boys and a girl, and I had my job. Elaine went a little…stir-crazy, I guess? We were seeing a Marriage Counselor. We _were_ working it out. Anyway, I was out on a call at the time. My Partner at the time, Stanley Grey, will vouch for me."

"We already talked to him, and he did," Briscoe stood. "Sorry about all the upheaval, but we have to reopen the case. A man was killed, and his ex-wife was almost killed. Everything we have points to your wife's murder, although we don't know why. Yet, that is."

"Judge Kapinski has approved Manhattan's subpoena," Farrow also stood. "We'll be sending everything to your crime labs. Not that there's much for you to look at. We never found the murder weapon."

"Do you know anything about a John Nash? He was a general Home and Lawn contractor. Might have worked on your home."

"Yeah…" Farrow nodded impatiently. "Think he did our lawn, round about the time we split."

"Think your wife might've been getting a little on the side?"

The flash in Farrow's eyes was the only confirmation Briscoe needed.

"Think we're done here," Farrow pointedly looked at his watch. "So, if you don't mind, I've got a precinct to run."

…..

 _27_ _th_ _Precinct_

"I'm telling you, Lieu, Farrow killed his wife!"

"And you know this…how?" Lieutenant Anita Van Buren asked.

"Almost twenty years with the NYPD, _and_ two failed marriages," Briscoe sat down at his desk, directly across from Rey Curtis. "In nine cases out of ten, it's the husband."

"There's always that tenth case, Lennie" Rey Curtis said.

"Yeah, but you weren't there when I asked him if he knew his wife was having an affair. I struck a nerve. He knew."

"Okay," Van Buren nodded. "I can see that. But, even if you're right, even if Farrow _did_ kill his wife, it still doesn't explain who killed Nash. There's a very frightened woman in the hospital right now, and I would like to be able to tell her she's safe. I can't do that until we find _those_ killers. Just about the only thing I do know is that it couldn't be Raymond Farrow. We can't even be sure Farrow was the one who killed his wife in the first place."

"They sent the evidence over," Curtis spoke up. "It wasn't much. Just some smudged fingerprints."

"No murder weapon?"

"The ME who examined Mrs. Farrow said it looked to be a baseball bat. But there were no baseball bats at her apartment. Her kids did play baseball, but those bats were accounted for."

Curtis sighed.

"It's been almost ten years," he continued. "I don't think anyone's going to find it now, after all this time."

"We're certainly not going to find it if we don't even bother to try," Van Buren stared down at the two Detectives.

"Get busy, you two," she ordered. "I'll deal with the paperwork."


	4. Chapter 4

_Newark, New Jersey_

Much to the consternation of the Newark PD, the Judge had given the Manhattan 27th Precinct permission to investigate the decade-old homicide of Elaine Farrow.

 _Not that there's much for us to investigate…_

Detective Lennie Briscoe snorted in disgust at his current surroundings. Ten years ago, it had been Elaine Farrow's apartment during her separation from her husband, Raymond Farrow. Back then, it had been a pestiferous rat-hole. Now, it was even worse…

 _What could make a housewife flee from comfortable Suburbia to this?_ Briscoe wondered. No stranger to broken marriages, he knew it could be anything. Anything from simple boredom, all the way to life-threatening abuse…

"Why would anyone move here?" Detective Rey Curtis muttered. "It's a dump."

The place hadn't been let out to rent in years. No heat, no light, no anything.

Flashlight out, Lennie stepped forward cautiously, floorboards squeaking in complaint under his feet.

Something skittered across the floor, just ahead of the pool of light from his flashlight.

 _Mouse? Or cockroach?_

 _Do I really want to know?_

"Lennie…" Rey Curtis spoke up from behind. "I think some of these floorboards might be hiding something."

The younger detective was stamping… _gently_ …on one of the floorboards. Even so…

"Be careful, Rey!" Briscoe cautioned. "Some of those floorboards look rickety. They might give out under you. Knew a friend that happened to. He wound up stuck halfway between two floors for the better part of a day."

"I'll be careful, Lennie."

Curtis moved around carefully, steps as soft as possible, stopping and listening to the floorboards as they creaked under his feet.

"Ah…" now he smiled triumphantly. " _Here…"_

"Give me a hand, Lennie," he knelt, fingers beginning to work on a floorboard.

After a minute of steady prying, the floorboard came up, wood shivering into sawdust right in the two detectives' hands, and Lennie brought his flashlight to bear on the new-made gaping hole in the floor.

"There!" he aimed his light at the thing hidden inside; a dirty-looking baseball bat.

…..

 _One week later_

 _3_ _rd_ _precinct_

 _649 Market Street_

Jack McCoy and Jamie Ross were here by special invitation of the District DA for the County of Essex.

 _This is what happens when two Districts cooperate,_ Jack McCoy thought as he took a seat in the 3rd's Interrogation Room One. It looked exactly like the room at the 23rd…

He and Jamie were not alone. Also, from Manhattan, were Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis. Representing the 3rd was Lieutenant Raymond Farrow, and Senior Detective Stanley Grey.

McCoy cleared his throat, then began.

"You are aware we had your wife's body exhumed."

"Yeah!" Farrow snapped. "A disgrace is what it is!"

"Detectives Briscoe and Curtis found the murder weapon, the baseball bat that was used to kill your wife, Lieutenant Farrow. It had been hidden in the floorboards of the bedroom of Elaine Farrow's apartment. We were able to type the blood on the bat. It was Elaine Farrow's blood on the bat. "

"The building was a rat-hole!" Farrow leaned forward. "And it was a Home Invasion."

"Yes," McCoy nodded. "That's what the investigators though back in _Eighty-Seven._ Stanley Grey headed that investigation, didn't he?"

"Yes! But what's that got to do with-"

"Either he was stupid, or he was colluding with you. Either way, he's going to lose his pension at the very least. And maybe even more. You see, the bat carried more than Elaine Farrow's blood."

Both Lieutenant Farrow and Stanley Grey went still.

"Detective Grey," McCoy continued. "You've lost your pension. But you can save yourself from a term in prison, if you cooperate."

"Uh…Lawyers?" Farrow stood up. "You want to arrest us, we want our attorneys. Now!"

McCoy stood too.

"You want to play it this way? Fine. We'll have a little talk with your District DA."

…..

Jamie Ross kept silent on the way to the motel the two Manhattan attorneys were staying at for the duration. Once there, though…

"Jack?" she spoke up.

"Yeah?" her boss had tossed his suit jacket over the back of a chair, was now loosening his tie.

"If this goes to trial, we'll be forced to admit the fingerprints were too decayed to make any sort of reading."

"I know," McCoy admitted. "I had to see how Farrow would react to the possibility, and Grey too. Grey's the weak link. If we can get him to bend, we've got Farrow."

"But Farrow's not the one we're after, is he?" Ross protested. "We're after the ones who killed John Nash and tried to kill Laura Taylor."

"The two cases are inextricably linked, Jamie. To get Nash's killers, we need to get Elaine Farrow's killers. Once we do that, everything will fall into place."

"If you say so…" Ross had real doubt about that, but Jack was the Boss, so…

"You hungry?" McCoy suddenly asked. "I am. Let's get some burgers


	5. Chapter 5

_Newark, New Jersey_

 _3_ _rd_ _Precinct_

 _649 Market Street_

Senior Detective Stanley Grey looked like a man surveying a ruined life.

His life…

His Defense Attorney, Nancy Cappelli, had apparently advised her client to throw himself upon the mercy of the court.

So, here he was, back in the 3rd's Interrogation Room, facing the Executive Assistant DA, and _his_ Assistant; Jamie Ross.

"So…" Jack McCoy sipped his coffee, then put it down. "How did this go down?"

Grey looked hesitantly at his attorney. Cappelli laid a hand on his arm.

"It's okay," she said. "Just tell him exactly what happened."

Grey sighed, bowed his head. Then, he looked back up, sadness in his eyes.

"I was out," he said. "In the cruiser, making rounds. Ray had told me he would be late. Just a personal issue he had to deal with. He had his police radio. That night, he called me on our personal radio signal, and he sounded…scared. Told me to come to Lainie's apartment. She was already dead when I got there."

"You didn't see him kill his wife?" McCoy interjected.

"No, Mr. McCoy. Ray indicated he was going to pick up some flowers, and try to see if he could take her out to a nice restaurant. His plan was to try to patch things up. But now, she's lying there, dead, beaten to death, I mean, _savagely_ beaten, and Ray having already been there countless times, his finger prints were all over the place."

"So, you covered for him."

"Yeah…" Grey bowed his head again. "It never occurred to me that he could be the killer. He _loved_ her."

McCoy nodded.

"Jamie," he said to Ross. "Have Briscoe and Curtis pick Lieutenant Farrow on Murder One."

He then turned back to Stanley Grey.

"If you cooperate, you won't see any prison time."

"What about his pension?" Cappelli asked. "He truly believed Raymond Farrow was innocent."

"He helped Farrow cover up evidence of the crime."

" _What_ evidence?" Grey snapped. "I never saw any baseball bat! If Ray did this, and I'm still not convinced he did, he hid it before I got there."

"You never saw the murder weapon?"

"Not hide nor hair," Grey stated. "I'll swear on a stack if I have to. All I did was tell the investigators that Ray had been with me that night, and that's _all_ that I did."

McCoy's cell phone rang.

"Excuse me," the attorney stepped out of the room to answer. "McCoy here."

"I hope you don't mind twists coming out of the blue," Lennie Briscoe's voice on the other end.

"It's fine in a good mystery novel, or movie," McCoy said. "In real life, in _my_ cases, not so much. What did you find?"

"CSU was finally able to identify the fingerprints on the baseball bat. It's not Farrow, _or_ Grey. It's Harold Janes, the landlord for Elaine Farrow's apartment."

McCoy sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Counselor?"

"Where is Janes now?"

"At Kirk Field Cemetery. He died five years ago."

"His fingerprints on the bat?"

"All over the bat."

"Damn…"

…..

"I don't exactly know what to say," apologizing to a wrongfully suspected person was bad enough. But in this case, he found himself offering the above mentioned _mea culpa_ to Lieutenant Farrow in front of Farrow's whole family; to Raymond Farrow, his second wife, Jennifer Farrow, and the two sons and daughter from the first marriage.

The eldest boy, Ray Jr., was in Police Academy; the other two, Steve and Lainie, both in college.

Gritting his teeth, McCoy got on with the job at hand.

"We were finally able to identify the murderer as Harold Janes, owner of the apartment your first wife rented."

" _Why?_ " Farrow was bewildered. "I don't understand…"

"We'll never know," McCoy bowed his head. "He died five years ago."

"I was wrong about that contractor," Farrow looked stricken. "I blamed him all those years. Thought they were having an affair…"

"They probably were," McCoy agreed. "But promiscuity doesn't necessarily equate with homicide. John Nash was completely innocent of Elaine Farrow's death. And _his_ wife, Laura Nash, nee Hill was totally uninvolved too."

If McCoy hadn't been carefully watching Farrow's sons and daughter, he would have missed it; Lainie's slight flinch and hasty downward glance, the supporting hand of Brother Steve, the convulsive swallow of the oldest son…

But he _had_ been looking. And now, he felt slightly ill…

"Lainie?" he focused his attention upon the girl. "Do you have anything to tell me?"

…..

 _1 Hogan Place_

"Sometimes, I _hate_ my job…" Jamie Ross wasn't much of a drinker. But, this time, she gratefully accepted the tumbler of scotch from Adam Schiff. McCoy accepted his scotch from his boss with a sigh.

"What a mess," he sighed again as he sat on the couch. "We almost indicted an innocent man. And all three of his kids are going to go to prison for the rest of their lives."

"Life sucks," Schiff agreed as he took his seat at his desk. "But you solved an attempted murder, and _two_ murders, one of which occurred about ten years ago, and in another state."

"I feel sorry for Lieutenant Farrow," Ross said. "His wife cheats on him, and another man kills her. Then his children…"

She felt McCoy's hand on her shoulder, and comforting presence.

"One of the worst words in the English language," he said. " _If only…"_

She sighed into the tumbler of scotch. If only the real killer had been found back in Eighty-seven. If only Farrow's children hadn't decided on vigilantism.

 _If only…_


End file.
